By comparison, the Betelgeuse, another red giant in the Orion constellation, has a radius 650 times that of our sun.

The biggest star known prior to the new discovery was the “Garnet Star” of Herschel also known as “mu Cephei”.

But Emily Levesque, of of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who also worked on the project, said “these stars are not the most massive known. They are only 25 times the mass of the Sun, while the most massive stars may have as much material as 150 suns.”